Jihadi Suicide Bombers: The New Wave

Jihadi Suicide Bombers: The New Wave
Ahmed Rashid

After September 11, 2001, readers around the world quickly learned about the basic
tenets of jihad and its distortion by al-Qaeda. Now the shelves of Western bookshops are again filled with books on the subject, which gives no sign of going away. Jihad, which means struggle, is "recommended" rather than obligatory for all Muslims, but its interpretation is literally an open book—the lesser jihad to purify one's soul and perform good deeds for the community, the greater jihad to defend Islam when it is under attack. Each major collection of Hadith, or the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad that were compiled by several Muslim scholars well after the Prophet's death, contains its own descriptions of jihad, with the result that the discussion of jihad has always been a matter of differing interpretations rather than literal observance.

Yet the young men who trained in these camps were not educated in the Islamic
schools called madrasas and they were inspired less by extremist Islamic ideology
than by their desires to see the world, handle weapons, and have a youthful adventure. It was a boy's world of reality games. "I realized that I had dreamed of this moment for years," writes Nasiri—a nom de plume.

Nobody in the West seemed to suspect at the time how extensively bin Laden had
already distorted Islam. His tactics had hardly anything to do with religion and everything to do with gaining political power and influence.

Jihad was no longer a defensive manoeuvre but an offensive weapon that elevated martyrdom. But the Koran categorically forbids suicide. Until al-Qaeda began turning
religious texts on their heads, martyrdom was accepted only as the last resort of a cornered Muslim warrior and not as a wilfully planned death. This radical change in the concept of martyrdom has been viewed by many commentators as the license for modern Islamic terrorism.

Suicide attacks have been made possible by the new training and indoctrination provided by al-Qaeda as well as the booming drug trade, which has provided the Taliban and al-Qaeda with enormous funds to compensate the families of young suicides. Even more tragic, women and children are now considered fair game. On November 6, 2007, a suicide bomber struck in Baghlan in northern Afghanistan, killing seventy-two Afghans
including five members of parliament and fifty-nine schoolchildren. Another ninetythree
children were wounded. Afghan schools are now regularly bombed by the Taliban and
some six hundred out of a total of 8,500 have been forced to close down, sending 300,000 students home. Over 150 teachers and students have been killed.

One household makes the detonator, another sews the belt, a third molds ball bearings,
and so on. These are then collected and paid for by the Taliban, who claim in their
propaganda that they have hundreds of willing youngsters lined up to carry out suicide
bombings. Their main problems, they say, are finding good targets and the lack of sufficient explosives. While in Pakistan most suicide bombers are Pakistanis, in Afghanistan they include Afghans, Pakistanis, Kashmiris, Central Asians, Chechens, and, most recently, a German-born Turk, Cuneyt Cifici, who on March 3 rammed his explosive-laden car into a US military outpost near Khost in eastern Afghanistan, killing two American soldiers and wounding another fifteen. Two Afghan civilians were also killed.

A similar human conveyor belt carries Africans, Arabs, and Europeans to Iraq, just for
the purpose of blowing themselves up. This year there has been an average of eighteen
suicide attacks a month in Iraq compared to eight to ten a month in 2007, according to a
US military spokesman in Baghdad in April. The suicide cult has become so accepted that ordinary al-Qaeda fighters are now wearing suicide belts as part of their equipment when they fight conventional battles with US forces.

The belts prevent them from being taken alive, allow them to kill Americans even as
they die, but above all satisfy a desire to constantly live with and embrace the idea of martyrdom.
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Ahmed Rashid is a well-known Pakistani journalist and best-seller author writing for such
publications as The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Far East Economic Review, etc. He appears regularly on international TV and radio networks such as CNN and BBC World. His works include, The Resurgence of Central Asia: Islam or Nationalism?, St. Martin's Press, 1994; Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, Yale University Press, 2000., and Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia, Yale University Press, 2002.

Excerpted from The New York Review of Books, Volume 55, Number 10· June 12, 2008
Source: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21473